The High Altar of the Conspiratorium Clerisy

LIONEL VIDEO: WTF Are GMOs?

He knoweth zip. Here’s a perfect example of knowing not the basics of a concept. And from someone who prides himself on cutting through the nonsense of superstition and mythology.

The latest. John Stossel is a hack. A sellout. Somehow he’s created this myth that he’s the libertarian skeptic, all-wise and all-knowing. But he’s out of his league and out of his mind when it comes to GMOs. And those are his good qualities. Exhibit A: This unmitigated dreck. Read for yourself Stossel’s breathtaking ignorance as to what GMOs are. It shows a profound and absolutely incomprehensible inability to grasp or a refusal to absorb the essence of Frankenfood.

Yet people don’t panic over ruby red grapefruits, which were first created in laboratories by bombarding strains of grapefruit with radiation. People don’t worry about corn and other crops bred in random varieties for centuries without farmers having any idea exactly what genetic changes occurred.

We didn’t even know what genes were when we first created new strains of plants and animals. There’s no reason to believe modern methods of altering genes are any more dangerous.

GMO stands for Genetically Modified Organism. Other names for the process include Genetic Engineering (GE) or Genetic Modification (GM), which are one and the same.

How is a GMO Different from Hybridization / Cross-Breeding?

Genetic modification is the process of forcing genes from one species into another entirely unrelated species. Unlike cross breeding or hybridization—both of which involve two related species and have been done without ill effects for centuries—genetic engineering forcefully breaches the naturally-occuring barriers between species.

Other examples of GMOs include strawberries and tomatoes injected with fish genes to protect the fruit from freezing, goats injected with spider genes to produce milk with proteins stronger than kevlar for use in industrial products, salmon that are genetically engineered with a growth hormone that allow them to keep growing larger, dairy cows injected with the genetically engineered hormone rBGH (also known as rBST) to increase milk production, and rice injected with human genes to produce pharmaceuticals.